


As Long As You'll Be My Friend At The End

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Crime Scenes, Depression, Drabbles, Fluff, Love, M/M, Self-Loathing, Solar System, Tea, Weather, drug use references, just cuteness, lots of love, mycroft that meddling bastard, not even cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 12:18:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/748422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chapters based on wonderful songs- snapshots of Sherlock's thoughts about John, Mycroft, life, death and, of course, The Work. Suggest a song and i'll love you forever! I also hate this title, so don't hate me if it changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Change In The Weather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On sunny days...  
> On rainy days...
> 
> song - A Drop In The Ocean, by Ron Pope

On sunny days, light streams through the windows and makes every dust mote glow with brilliant, warm light. John sits in his armchair, sips his tea and reads the newspaper commenting out loud on mundane, irritating events that have nothing to do with bees, serial killers or the effect of alcohol on blood coagulation after death. He looks like a school teacher or a counselor or perhaps a therapist in his jumpers, button downs and jeans. 

You’d never guess that he’d been a soldier, but that’s because you’re an idiot and you wouldn't see the way he used to limp and the way his face goes carefully blank and his back goes stiff when we investigate gunshot victims. You wouldn't notice the fading tan-lines or the remnants of his old military posture, or the way he assesses people as risk factors rather than “friends” or “not friends”. Once he told me that people don’t have enemies in their real lives; he said they have girlfriends, boyfriends, people they like and don’t like, but that’s hard to remember when anyone around you might be about to shoot you. In his mind, I think, he’s never left Afghanistan. I've simply joined him there.

On sunny days he walks to the shop on the corner and buys milk. If he’s not angry sometimes he’ll take my scarf, wrapped around his neck like warm, comforting hands. It always comes back warm and smelling of soap and smog, adventure and sunlight. 

On rainy days our flat is dark and cold and the grey of the sky seeps through the walls and pavement and leeches the colour out of every word we say and everything we do. It draws all the energy out of John, and he complains about his leg. His shoulder is affected by the rain too, but he doesn't talk about it. I am always struck by the irony of his silence about his physical injury despite his incessant whining about his leg, which we both know to be psychosomatic. 

On rainy days John makes me tea without being asked. He balances two cups of hot liquid like only an Englishman can, bringing me warmth and comfort and brief respite from boredom, all in a chipped ceramic mug. He never smiles when he hands it to me. I know he likes feeling needed and needs to be liked, I know he likes having someone to take care of, but I also know that he think’s I’m an insufferable lazy arse and he might spill his tea out of shock if I ever thanked him, so I don’t. 

On rainy days the violin in the corner plays me, moving my arm up and down and pulling sounds previously unknown to mankind out of my broken body. I am blinded, I am lost, I am swallowed whole by the music as it’s torn out of my pathetic rotting bones. I am pulled apart and put back together, I am examined, dissected, dismantled, discounted and discarded. I am rebuilt from new parts, from muscle and bone, sinew and skin, stitched together with notes and measures, and when the last drawn out sigh leaves my body and I can see and breathe again, John is watching me, wondering, perhaps, how it’s medically possible for a violin to dismantle and re-create a human being. 

On sunny days John watches horrible telly and drinks coffee. Coffee smells like America and money and hope and business, and I want John to smell like other peoples’ blood and like street lamps and taxis. I want John to smell like a crime scene. Sometimes on sunny days I make him tea, just so he doesn't drink coffee. 

On sunny days Lestrade texts me. He tells me what the rain washed in, he asks me to fix London, like a child in a textile factory, with small, delicate, breakable hands deep in the cogs of the city, cutting a tangled thread or finding a fallen spool. John comes with me, walking quickly without limping to keep up, and he smells right and he looks right and he tells me that I’m amazing when I’m right. Sometimes he’s wrong, but it doesn't matter because we’re together, and that is the definition of right.

In that sense, John is correct;  
I would rather be dead than wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is actually not one of my favorite songs, but what better to write fluff to? :)


	2. Under The Bridge Downtown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During cases...  
> Between cases...
> 
> song - Under The Bridge, by Red Hot Chili Peppers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> errr this chapter is less happy... not really fluffy at all... quite sad really.... drug use references, depression, self-loathing, endless fear and darkness... well don't worry, our favorite consulting detective (by default - he's the only one in the world!) will be better soon :)

Between cases I am lost. I am small, I am weak, I am useless, contemptible, less than human. I am unforgivable, unlovable, impossible.

Between cases my mind palace becomes a prison and I am forced to relive every meaningless distraction that’s stumbled across my path in the past 34 years. I am alone with my inadequacy and I want to scream NO, I want to cringe, I want to tear into my arms and chest with John’s army knife, I want to beg him to do his job, be a doctor, be a surgeon, open my skull, my rib cage, find what’s wrong and take it away, take it out, I don’t want it. Every time I said the wrong thing, every time I scared my mother or angered my father, every time I disappointed Mycroft, every failed relationship and conversation circling over and over, driving me mad. 

Between cases I am mad. 

During cases, John says, there’s a light in my eyes and I’m unstoppable, brilliant, I am an inspiration to the uneducated masses. I am sharp, I am dangerous, I am incredible, remarkable, stunning, novel and exciting. I am an enigma, a chance, a change, a one-in-a-million chance mutation, a beacon of hope in the smog. I am lovely, precious, worth it. 

During cases I have peace. New material, new information, new people and places, it all clears space in my mind somehow. During cases I can think, I can see and hear and tolerate the bovine stupidity of humanity and appreciate the apricot-coloured glow that is John. 

Between Cases I am alone, and nothing John does changes that for long. I am empty, I am full, I am nothing but transport, just like everyone else. The John vehicle transports warmth and kindness and tea and love. The Sherlock vehicle transports an engine, a machine, a mind that cannot be stilled. Scientists worked (failed) for years to create a perpetual motion machine - it has been found. I do not eat, I rarely sleep, and yet the wheels turn. 

Between cases I am desperate. I turn to stone, I turn to glass, I am hard and cold and impossibly fragile. In long lulls I turn to old enemies, in longer lulls I turn to old friends. In the worst lulls I turn to old habits. When the noise is threatening to overtake the last of my mind, there’s a man I can meet underneath Holborn Bridge. He’s stupid and smells like fish and coconuts and he contracted AIDS from a dirty needle two years ago and hasn't sought medical attention, but when I’m at the end of my metaphorical rope and it’s between cocaine and John’s browning, I choose the drugs, carefully measuring out just enough to chase away the burning, stinging horror in my mind. Then it all starts over. 

Between cases I wear a robe. I won’t absentmindedly roll up the sleeves on a dressing gown, revealing bloody pinpoints with bruised halos to my concerned flatmate. The silk feels smooth and expensive on my skin, and it’s soothing and cool but ultimately useless, like a cold glass of water in the middle of a desert shootout in Afghanistan, burning under the sun and gunfire. 

Between cases I am less than genius, less than human. 

Between cases I am a part of the city, a stone on the street, I am less than living, I am broken, I am useless. I am a cog in the corporate machine, I am a nail in a stall in the black market. Those upstanding citizens who pass me on the streets avert their eyes, acknowledging me for what I am - not even a freak, not even different, identical to the despised masses, a byproduct of someone else's relationship. I am waste.

Between cases I do not speak to John, I do not look at him, I do not touch him.

Between cases I am a virus, crawling inside strangers and overtaking their minds, their hearts, their very bones. I want to know what it's like to be them, so simple, so I become them, I grow inside them to fill and consume them, until they burst and there's nothing but sharp, tiny stars of anger cutting into my cerebral cortex. 

Between and during cases I want so badly to protect John, but I am the most dangerous thing in his life, and I can’t protect anyone from myself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took a lot out of me, like you have no idea. Writing that much depression and self-loathing into anything is going to take a toll. Now go drink some tea and think about something happy; I think I'll write something lovely for the next chapter. 
> 
> comment and I'll love you!


	3. Most Of Us Are Bitter Over Someone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before John...  
> With John...
> 
> song - Youth, by Daughter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a bit happier than the last, though not much. siiigh i really need to get used to this cheerfulness/fluff thing.

Before John, I spent years of my life searching for distractions. I did not hate myself - I had no reason to. I had no concept of being, nothing to compare living to. Correct but cliche, I've heard it said that you can’t appreciate light without a bit of darkness, and darkness is the worst when you've had a taste of light. In the same way, I learned to appreciate John Watson as Light, and everyone else and everywhere he isn't as unending, overwhelming, all-encompassing Darkness.

Before John I puzzled over crime and medicine, science and mathematics, languages and relationships alike. I tested theories in petri dishes and bedrooms, with chemicals and condoms. Men and women became independent variables. Times, places and reasons were experimental values and emotion - sentiment - never entered the picture. In all of this twisted order, Victor Trevor was my constant. He was tall and thin and smelled of vanilla and churches, he was kind to small children and he had rescued a puppy from one of my experiments (I was furious) and raised it himself, because that's just the sort of thing he did. He was volunteering in the emergency room at Bart's when he was 16. He was a surgeon by 18, considered a genius, a prodigy, a freak. He had my intelligence, my charm and my money, he was very good looking and he was popular enough, but he had something I definitely lacked. Victor had compassion. His life was run by sentiment, and I pitied him because it controlled him.

Before John, I gravitated towards the people who were most like me. As I'm sure you can imagine, maddening genius is hard to come by, and I spent years of my life wrapped up in myself and the Work. Mycroft understands what it's like to be smarter, faster, stronger than average, but he believes that we have been given a gift and "ours is a high and lonely destiny," and uses his powers of perfect reasoning primarily to take over the world (dull) and secondarily to make my life a living hell without the slightest pretense of privacy. 

Before John, Mycroft let his god complex run wild. He managed my life and relationships without invitation and did his best to make sure I was living my life in a way that would be beneficial  
1\. to queen and country, as if I cared,  
2\. to the other people in my life, as if I cared, and  
3\. to myself, as if I cared.  
In the end it was Mycroft, my own brother, who decided that Victor and I shouldn't be together. We were 20 and he was 25 and Mother had been pestering me about my stunning apathy towards other peoples’ petty emotions and Mycroft about his shaky moral compass ever since the Moscow fiasco, which she read about in the paper a week after. Because of her interference, Mycroft “invited” Victor to have coffee with him and gave him a choice rather than simply hiring a hit man. He told my lover, the closest thing I had to a friend until John came along, that he could take a few thousand pounds and disappear from my life or his life would be made very short and unpleasant indeed. I wasn't incredibly upset, I wasn't really even surprised that he left me, I was confused above all else. We had been so happy... the sex was enjoyable for both of us, I helped him with his latest charity project and he helped me with the few cases that were beginning to come my way, we had a relationship. Of course he would leave me eventually, everyone would, but the timing made no sense. It took me years to discover Mycroft’s manipulation, and there was nothing I could do. By that time Victor was married to a woman from Nepal, where he had used Mycroft’s money to start a non-profit AIDS clinic, like he’d always wanted to. I was alone again. 

Before John I was lost. Victor left me with a sense of something missing; he was the flash of lightning that briefly showed me how much better life could be. He was distant, he was brilliant, vaguely dangerous with all his feelings, he was made of light and life and hope and energy, and then he was gone. 

With John I am inadequate. I am so much less than him. He is hard and controlled, he is soft and loving, he is sunshine and thunder and everything all at once. He is flexible, changing, constantly shifting to meet the needs of those around him. His empathy is more than a match for my apathy, and his humanity shimmers and reflects off of the machinery in my mind. He is strong enough to protect and kind enough to try. He is nothing like Victor.

Before John I thought I might eventually grow to love Victor. He was kind to me when no one else was, and he acknowledged the value of my abilities. What more is love?

With John I know I’m more in control than I was with Victor. If he leaves me (and he certainly will) it will be because of one of my many faults, not because of something my brother did or said. He is kind and he is strong, kind enough to tolerate my inadequacy and strong enough to refuse Mycroft's bribes and threats. We are not compatible. He is short and I am tall, he is summer and spring and new life and I am the change in the weather in fall, I am the shortening of days and the depths of winter. He is sand and hot sun, flowers and light rain. I am sculpted from icicles and flaking, powdered snow, decayed organic material and cold winter light. Where he is kind I am clever. When he is warm silence I am pride, where he is honey, I am salt. Everything good about him is everything wrong with me. 

With John I am complete. He is the part of me that I have always been missing. We are a year, a cycle of life and death. We are cool water in summer and warm fires in winter. We are yin and yang, and when we are together, we are everything. A song John used to play says “all the stars and all the worlds filling up this universe could never be as close as us, could never shine as bright as us.”  
There are stars shining through my skin, there are worlds spinning through his blood. 

With John, the solar system matters, because it is part of him and I need him like he needs oxygen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The official song for this chapter was Youth, by Daughter, but the song John likes is Waiting For The Siren's Call, by Moby. I love it.  
> please tell me what you think of the writing, the music, whatever! also, still not beta-ed, so please let me know if you catch any errors.
> 
> i know this hasn't been updated in a while, i apologize, I'm working on some Merthur with someone excellent, but this will be updated just as soon as i get a song recommendation from one of you. so GO!


End file.
